Use a Nokia N82 TFT Panel with Your Arduino

[Andy] has been hard at work reverse-engineering the Nokia N82 2.4 inch cell phone display for use with an Arduino. As pointed out in the article, this same 2.4 inch display can be found in at least seven other Nokia products, so they are readily available. The panels can be found for as low as 3 pounds (or a little less than 5 dollars) on Ebay.

The results are quite good and can be seen in the videos after the break. The first demo displays a simulated weather report, and the second displays some JPEG images. Although an Arduino Mega was used in this demonstration, a standard Arduino can be used as well. Schematics as well as a bill of materials is included in the article, however if you’d rather just buy a board, he’s selling the rest of what he’s built on a first come first served basis. No word on how many he has in stock though!

Lovely screen. Such a shame it’s not SPI though. I just don’t tend to use any parts equipped with that sort of parallel bus. Perhaps driving it with a shift register would be a good solution for lower cost AVRs and PICs.

A valid point. The fact the screen has a frame buffer and it supports windowed updates, hardware scrolling, etc. works to reduce the bandwidth required. I was thinking of using it for simple yet flashy annunciators and display of readings. (Way flashier than a HD44780 for example.)

If I wanted anything more (photos, movies..) – I would use a 32-bit micro which would likely have the parallel bus.

Many (most?) Series 40 Nokias do use SPI interface LCDs, just the inexpensive ones are less than 320×240. I expect the latest Nokia Ashas will have LVDS LCDs like the Symbian handsets which is totally hacker unfriendly.

And on the subject of David Brooks, via a commenter at LGF, this is, um, weird. It appears that either Brooksie is trying to parody people who don’t like Romney, or he’s thrown in with MoDo against the Yes-We-Klan ticket. (Maybe Romney turned down his request to sit in his lap or something, and he’s pissed off.)